


Kate's Last Words

by EmilysRose



Series: Love Me Tender [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst fic, Derek POV, F/M, Healing, I hate Kate, Isolation, Lace Panties, Meditation, Mentions of Stabbing, PTSD, Smoking, Tattoos, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Yoga, ends happy, hurt fic, meddling siblings, past trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-06-30 21:50:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15760383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmilysRose/pseuds/EmilysRose
Summary: Derek Hale was living. Not much more, just living. Being alive required a lot more than he was capable of doing--and after the life he'd had? Well... he was living. That was something. Then Stiles showed up.





	Kate's Last Words

**Author's Note:**

> So-- the first chapter is really, really angsty. Like, really angsty. You don't technically have to read it if you feel uncomfortable with the angst--the second chapter can be considered a stand-alone and describe all the stuff in the first chapter. So, enjoy

“Seriously, I’m fine.” Derek felt like he’d been saying those words too often lately. ‘I’m fine’, ‘yeah, I’m fine, just had a bad night’s sleep’, or his personal favorite ‘Oh, no, I’m fine, what’s your excuse?’. It was getting to be too much. If he had to say he was fine one more god damn time he was pretty sure he was going to break down and tell some unsuspecting victim how very _not_ fine he was. “Fine as a fiddle, or whatever that saying is,” Derek said idly as he clicked through Novel 12 links. He was in the mood for a bodice ripper.

Derek couldn’t remember what he’d originally been looking for in the online free book database. He’d come online for a purpose, for a specific book. That had been about three hours ago.

On the other end of the line, Cora made a snorting noise that cracked through the receiver a bit, making the muscle near Derek’s eye twitch. “Uh, pretty sure that’s ‘fit as a fiddle’ there, brother—”

“Bite me.”

“—and since I had to correct you,” Cora said in a louder voice, and it sounded like someone was talking on her end—Derek could hear the words ‘new low cost!’—and a weird beeping noise. “You’re obviously not fine.”

“You sound incredibly smug right now.”

“Whatever. I know you haven’t left the building in days, except for work. Which doesn’t count, by the way. You have the worst job ever.”

Derek found himself correcting his posture from where he’d slumped over his computer desk. His lower back ached. “How?” Derek demanded. _He_ didn’t even know how long it had been since he’d left his building. Days, probably. A week, maybe? Definitely since Monday, since on Monday ass-hole-with-a-flat-top had run into him in his favorite coffee shop and splashed Derek’s coffee all over his favorite shirt. But what day was it? He had to click on the calendar on his computer, which now had a judging glow about it. Cora was right. It had been almost a full week. “Who the fuck sold me out? Was it Isaac? Or Boyd?” Derek couldn’t imagine either one of his roommates telling on him, though. Isaac had tried dating his sister for a brief time and he was still terrified of her. And Boyd… no way Boyd had. No way. The guy was more stoic than Derek. But who else even knew what Derek did? No one at work even knew his first time, much less who to call when he became a work-a-holic shut in.

“Derek,” Cora sounded very serious, which was a typic Cora thing to sound like, but it still made Derek grind his teeth together. It made him pull back from his laptop and lean fully into his chair, rocking back and forth. He moved his phone from his right cheek to his left so he could itch the overgrown hair that had become a beard… two weeks ago? Three? “Seriously, you have to get out of there once and a while. Make some friends. Get a hobby. Join a club. I know you like to read—find a book club. Do something outside of staying in your flat and going to work. Work doesn’t count since it’s attached to your building. C’mon… you should, uh, you should take up some yoga!” And that level of enthusiasm for what Cora had once described as a ‘hooker sport’ could only come from one source.

“Scott’s suggestion?” Derek asked, absently putting his bare feet up against the wall near the water stain that had been slowly growing since he’d bought the building from his parent’s survivor’s benefits. It had been put into savings when it ended at 18 and he hadn’t touched it for years. It felt like blood money. But he’d needed a place to live, a place to work.

“Don’t tell Malia.”

“What? You don’t want our dear cousin to know you can bend over and touch your toes?” Derek teased, watching his own toes wiggle. He had a lot of hair growing on the top of his biggest toe, a large dusting of black that contrasted sharply with his pale skin. He used to be tan—his mother had been half Navajo—but he’d spent too much time indoors, away from the glare of the sun.

“Fuck off, Der-bear.” Cora had weird views on femininity, sometimes absolutely refusing to do anything if it was considered the least bit girly. For a while there, after their parents had died, she’d even refused personal hygiene standards like washing her hair.

Their parent's death had fucked them over in a lot of ways. Cora had gotten dirty and cruel. It had turned Laura into an overbearing life-coach. And Derek into… Derek. It was safe to say that his sister’s had managed to get over their ugly mourning periods.

“Hey, no judgment. I bet it comes in handy when you and Scott—”

“Derek.” Cora snarled.

Derek couldn’t help his smile even as he sat in silence. Back in the day, before Cora had met her strangely happy, dopy, simple and sweet fiancé she’d been a bit of a slut. She’d sleep—and terrify—any marginally beautiful man she could get her hands on and was shameless about it afterward. Then came along dopey fucking Scott McCall. Some friend of friend with a weird name that Malia knew.

Derek let the silence spread between the two of them, knowing neither one of them were really bothered by it. He could hear the sounds of Telemundo in the background. Scott loved Telemundo.

Cora broke the silence first. “But you’re right. Yoga is great for sex. Scott can do this thing with his hips that’s crazy good and flexible.” In the background Derek could hear someone making this weird squawking, gagging noise that didn’t sound possible from a human throat. Then Scott’s laughter.

“Cora… I ain’t takin’ yoga just so I can get laid better.”

“S’not like you’re getting any anyway.” She muttered.

He didn’t speak right away, forcing himself to bite off the first few comments that came to mind: ‘fuck you’ or ‘I can’t believe you just went there’ or ‘you’re a cruel ass bitch’. He wanted to say something cruel, something that would make Cora realize how deeply she had hurt him with her simple words. Maybe he’d mention Cora’s bad dating past. Or say the truth. How her comment made his heart work too fast and too irregular to be natural. How it felt like a two-hundred-pound man was sitting on his chest and how all the shadows in his darkroom grew deeper and menacing. How he could smell the perfume in the air, like cloying lavender, even though there was no perfume. Mostly, though, Derek felt the urge to hang up.

He bit all that off. Buried it down deep. Took a huge breathe in. “It’s easier to have sex when you’re seeing someone.” His voice was even, measured, a little dead.

“You haven’t had a date since—”

“I know.” He snarled. He let his head drop back so he could look at the way his computer’s screen glowed in his otherwise pitch-black room. He flexed his claves to get out the shakes in them. “I am very much aware of how pathetically alone—” Cora made a soft noise that he chose to ignore “—I am compared to everyone else around me. But, I’m happy,” ish “so let’s just stop talking about my lack of prospects and get back to this whole yoga thing. Okay?” He tried not to let the plea come out through his voice but it was still there. Still suffocatingly pathetic.

Turns out Cora didn’t have much to say on the subject. It wasn’t really surprising. She did it once a weekend in a couple’s class with Scott. Scott himself did it three or four times a week in advanced classes as a way of keeping in shape for his college lacrosse. Mostly Cora grumbled about how the other yoga students were dirty hippies who preached veganism. Scott was totally into it and refused to buy anything with meat so she had to steal her hamburgers at lunch during work.

“So… what? You don’t like yoga?” Derek asked, scratching at the tattoo of his inner right wrist. It had been a name, a while ago. Not something that he’d chosen himself but a symbol to show his everlasting love, pressured by his ex. She’d said it was better, meant more, than rings ever could. Now it was nothing more than two stark and massive black marks, stacked on top of each other in the symbol of gay love. Kate had hated his bi-sexuality. Fitting that he’d cover her name with it.

‘You’re so desperate for love you’d even be willing to take a dick up the ass,’ she used to say, before bringing Derek in for a kiss on the neck or temple to soften the blow.

Derek used to get panic attacks at the sight of the four looping letters on his wrist. After he’d gotten out of the hospital he’d just… covered it up. Put band-aids on it or long sleeves. It hadn’t seemed permanent enough. And yet anything more had seemed _too_ permanent. He’d freaked out so bad before the cover-up that that tattoo artist had thought Derek was trying to mug his shop… but now, now Derek only felt a kind of strange, horrible sadness at the sight of his wrist. A kind of lingering horror that felt like the slid of knives in his gut. Knives—Knives were still a problem for him, though. Recently he’d walked into the kitchen when Boyd was making food—chopping some vegetables for goulash—and Derek had run out of the room. But he’d come out the next day. It was progress, of a sort.

“I like yoga,” Cora admitted. Derek knew better than to ask her to elaborate. “There’s a studio not far from your apartment, actually. You should take a class.”

Derek sighed. “And just how long have you—or I guess Scott—been planning this intervention?” He asked.

“We’re worried about you, Derek. Me, Malia, Scott—Hell, you know Laura. She’s worried too, in her own way.” Her own micro-managing way, Cora said without saying. “Since you blocked her number she’s been annoying me non-stop to ask what you’re up to.”

When the silence stretched Cora made a soft sound like she was about to say something and then cut herself off at the last moment. It sounded like she was going to try again but then a voice cut through her end of the conversation. A loud voice yelling something about Batman. “Hey, I gotta go. You check out yoga, yeah? At least go out to do something?”

“I’ll think about it.”

Cora snorted. “I guess that’s good enough. Oh, Scott says hi, by the by.”

“Tell him I said his Machiavellian ways won’t work on me,” Derek said, finding a smile on his face. “And don’t get shot.” It was the usual parting words he gave his sister, one he’d picked up after she joined the LA Police Academy.

“Him or me?”

“Dumbass.”

With a laugh, Cora hung up. Derek pulled the phone away from his face and looked down at it, seeing the image of his sister’s staring up at the screen. Laura was in the middle, her big, wide, politician smile beaming as she slugged both her younger brother and sister under her arms and into the picture. She’d given her phone to some tourists when they were out visiting her in New York, the Statue of Liberty barely seen in the background, the sky so—so blue. Derek and Cora both had the same identical scowls, the same drawn in eyebrows, the same ‘oh, Laura’ expressions on their faces. He found, looking at it, that he missed his older sister a lot. Not the Laura that Laura had become after their parent's death—the suffocating ‘I have your life planned out for you’ Laura that she’d become—but the fun, teasing older sister he’d loved as a child.

The screen went blank and his remaining family disappeared. Derek let his phone clutter that was slowly overtaking his desk and sat up from his chair His knees felt weak from sitting down too long and his chest ached fiercely. He felt himself rubbing his breastbone as he walked towards the bed, falling down into the mess of unwashed pillows and blankets.

He could hear Boyd playing his music in the next room. Some kind of slow and sexual RnB with heavy bass in it. Isaac—who rented a room across the hall—was gone because he was almost always gone these days. He’d found some girlfriend that was as scary as Cora—some kind of Olympic archer champion—that had her own place. The way they were going, he’d probably move in with her soon.

It was nice, listening to other people living in his space. Almost like living in a home.

Derek had a home, once. A long, long time ago. Parents and uncles and cousins and siblings. The best home anyone could ever have. At times, when the loneliness crept in as he was working or sleeping or reading or fucking grabbing cereal to eat… the lack of family would press down into him like a familiar and suffocating blanket.

But it was gone, now. Through the years of mourning and abuse, he’d put himself through—and the years of mandatory and then chosen therapy—Derek had come to the conclusion that relationships were essential necessities for living. But they were also breakable things that could ruin a person.

Derek had always heard books and movies and bad poetry compare broken relationships to mirros, but Derke had never seen it that way. Mirrors are solid. A mirror is always a mirror, no matter if it’s broken into a bunch of little shards that reflect a persons fragmented self back to them. Even if you shatter a mirror into a million pieces you can slowly pull it back together with duct tape and gorilla glue. You can still see that cracked relfection. Relationships weren’t anything like that. They had to be built slowly over time—either carefully or sloppily, in desire or in boredom—and when they were broken, they can’t ever be the same. The absence is there and nothing more. There will always be that work, those memories, scattered about and making him feel resentful that they were gone. In a way, relationships were like building things out of legos without a plan in mind.

Derek’s first official therapist… god, what had his name been? Something stupid like Friendly or Smiley or something. He’d been from Child Services and had been all sympathetic smiles and ‘we know what’s best’ attitude that Laura had soaked up like a fucking sponge. Derek had hated the guy. All he did was make Derek sit down and play with fucking legos all day. The little kind, too, the kinds that hurt like a bitch to walk on. Derek had spent hours upon hours sitting on a clean white carpet with Cora as Dr. Fucking Smiley talked to Laura like she was the only cognitive adult in the room. He’d put bright squares of plastic ontop of bright squares of plastic. Make a plane, a building, a fort… and the next time he’d come it would all be dismantled, just a bunch of colorful legos that used to hold an image, smashed to pieces in the fucker’s white carpet.

Derek hated legos.

Relationships weren’t much better, in his opinion. He could hardly talk to his family without wanting to pull his hair out and scream. Cora was okay. She pushed him but she wasn’t too bad. She wasn’t as blunt as Malia and didn’t make him feel like such a fuck up, like Laura did.

It was like—like the entire event with his Kate had redefined his relationship with his family. It used to be that they were all messed up and healing from their families deaths. It used to be that they were all suvivors. And then Kate had come around… and now he was a victim. A lone victim. Derek scratched at his wrist absently before going back to rub at his aching chest. To his family, he was no longer Derek, just some stupid boy who’d fallen for the passionate, possessive, dysfunctional older woman. The stupid boy who had decided that his entire life was going to revolve around some relationship _they_ called sick and twisted and co-dependent. Derek was, forever, the stupid boy who decided to ignore his family for two entire years so he could be the ideal boyfriend. Whose ideal boyfriend?... he was still trying to figure that out. Had it all been Kate? Had it been him? Where did their personalities end and their individualism begin?

It was all so fucked up. Derek had been messed up in the head before Kate. He was still messed up long after she’d been incarcerated.

Derek rubbed aggressively at his chest, feeling the hard plate of his sternum bone. He used to be skinny enough that he could feel the little dips and curves of the bone itself, feel how it branched out into his intercarstals and his ribcage. He’d been, what, one hundred pounds? One hundred and ten pounds? Thin enough that he’d been nothing but skin and bones. Now though, there was a healthy padding of skin and muscle there. Because of his diet and his time spent at his gym upstairs he was all muscle. Nothing but it, really: muscle, hair, and the tattoo he’d gotten to commemorate the big moments of his life. Like Kate’s name that had turned into a marriage equality symbol. Or the small tattoo of a heart he’d gotten over his actual heart to commemorate the time he’d had open heart bypass surgery because the malnutrition had caused him to have a heart attack. Back when he’d been nothing but slowly withering bones and tightly spread skin.

Kate had hated his thinness—had been openly disgusted and judgmental by it, even. Over the long years of therapy, Derek had realized how at odds that disgust was with Kate’s actions. Kate had never tried to encourage him to eat better. Had loved watching those shows about people so big they needed skin reduction surgery. She had also loved to fuck him. If she had been physically repulsed by him, why had she bothered to stick around? _Why why why? So many questions but no one to answer them_.

Or, at least, not the right person was there to answer them. And he wasn't about to visit Kate in jail.

Derek’s hadn moved down, under his shirt, so he could rub the skin of his sternum directly, smoothing circles into the ache that had spread over his entire torso. It wouldn’t work—the circles never worked to actually sooth—and he knew that. His therapists all said that it was just his anxiety and panic manifesting physically, a kind of precursor to a panic attack that never came. They said breathing techniques and calming thoughts would work best to soothe the ache. But he liked his circles. There was something soothing about rubbing the ache away.

His fingers lifted up the t-shirt and his hand pressed against the skin of his belly. His fingers brushed gently against the raised and ugly scars from the kitchen knife Kate had shoved into his belly. They were strange little things, different from all the other scars that littered Derek’s skin from the years he’d been alive. There were three of them, probably no bigger than an inch or two, and bigger on one end than the other because of how deep the knife had gone in. Kate’s scars were delicate compared to the surgical scars needed to repair his internal organs.

Derek couldn’t feel it with his fingers but he knew that if he raised his shirt he’d find the tattoos he’d placed by them. Tattoos to commemorate. To remember. The words _No, you can’t fucking leave me—fuck you—you can’t, I love you too fucking much_ were always there. Always on his body and soul, right next to his scars both delicate and surgical.

“Why why why,” Derek muttered, just to hear something but the dull roar of Boyd’s music in the background. _Why why why_.

**Author's Note:**

> Abusive relationships take a really long time to heal from, especially when you go to them because of past trauma. Seek help and don't be afraid to get it.
> 
> 18007997233 for the National Domestic Violence Hotline


End file.
